[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
two mothers or two fathers, manageable perhaps in the context of everyday
Uses Cultural Studies 10/3/05 11:52 am Page 188
188 Further Materials II: Butler s Antigone s Claim
life, and a source of comedy in recent popular culture, hold up in law?3 And
what greater warning could there be to those who wish to move away from
this norm that they might, in so doing, endanger the life of the child? The
figure of Antigone allows Butler to imagine the psychic pain wrought upon
the shadowy persons fulfilling unauthorised or irregular kinship roles.
For these reasons Butler challenges psychoanalysis to critically interro-
gate its structuralist presuppositions , i.e. its normative assumptions which
even though they troubled Juliet Mitchell many years ago nonetheless
remain intact (Mitchell, 1984). She also chastises Lacanians for the author-
itative defense of the Symbolic as above social critique, indeed for its
function as warning against those who dare to pursue utopian efforts . In a
gesture reminiscent of her taking up the position of the phallic lesbian in
order to attack the Lacanian Symbolic in Bodies That Matter (Butler, 1993),
Butler again pushes the Symbolic off its pedestal, reducing it to the status of
just another horizon of social norms, a form of reification with stark con-
sequences for gendered life . To uphold the sanctity of the Symbolic as the
basis for social and cultural organisation which psychoanalysis plainly
does is to retain an inner theological core. That Butler so perseveres (as she
has done in earlier work) with this job of prising open the doors of the
Symbolic (which she here likens to Antigone s tomb) is testimony to her
political commitment to rearranging gender relations, and in this case to
question the necessity of mothers and fathers. Of course there is a total
logic to this current inquiry, in that having demonstrated in Gender Trouble
(Butler, 1990) how gender is called into being, and for the sake of hetero-
sexual reproduction is repetitively enacted so as to become the basis for
recognition in terms of what it is to be human (i.e. being a girl ), Butler now
looks to the repeated enactments of kinship ideals when faced with the
challenge to social organisation here proposed in the figure of Antigone.
As though aware of the intractable problems in loosening the grip of
Oedipus and replacing his authority on how we live, with Antigone s more
fluid and uncertain power, Butler s persistence takes on something of
Antigone s gesture of defiance. She will not relinquish psychoanalysis in
favour of a mere feminist sociology of family life because that would be to
let go of understanding desire and its unruly proliferations, the uncon-
scious, fear, trauma, dreams, obsessions, compulsive repetitions, and so
on. As Campbell has argued Butler s work requires a psychoanalytic
account of the social production of the subject (Campbell, 2001).
Psychoanalysis also allows exploration of the whole range of psychic resist-
ances to change which is necessary for political understanding. Antigone
Uses Cultural Studies 10/3/05 11:52 am Page 189
Further Materials II: Butler s Antigone s Claim 189
stands at the interface between the psychic and the social and through her
Butler imagines a revised or re-articulated (let us say a weaker) Symbolic. A
post-structuralist kinship of this sort, would allow more diverse socially
survivable arrangements, carrying fewer parental warnings about harm to
children. Far from saying let s relax our attitudes to incest , Butler is show-
ing how the horror and fear of interfering with this foundational stricture
becomes a way of refusing to encounter proliferating and irregular rela-
tions of love and affiliation beyond those fully sanctioned by the state (see
also Bell, 1997).
Antigone is the unimaginable in culture, by virtue of her incestuous
parentage, her abject status produces a shudder across the social field, but
she also resists this status by defying the state and asserting a human bond
which she is not expected to dare to acknowledge. I think Butler asks us to [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
zanotowane.pl doc.pisz.pl pdf.pisz.pl akte20.pev.pl
two mothers or two fathers, manageable perhaps in the context of everyday
Uses Cultural Studies 10/3/05 11:52 am Page 188
188 Further Materials II: Butler s Antigone s Claim
life, and a source of comedy in recent popular culture, hold up in law?3 And
what greater warning could there be to those who wish to move away from
this norm that they might, in so doing, endanger the life of the child? The
figure of Antigone allows Butler to imagine the psychic pain wrought upon
the shadowy persons fulfilling unauthorised or irregular kinship roles.
For these reasons Butler challenges psychoanalysis to critically interro-
gate its structuralist presuppositions , i.e. its normative assumptions which
even though they troubled Juliet Mitchell many years ago nonetheless
remain intact (Mitchell, 1984). She also chastises Lacanians for the author-
itative defense of the Symbolic as above social critique, indeed for its
function as warning against those who dare to pursue utopian efforts . In a
gesture reminiscent of her taking up the position of the phallic lesbian in
order to attack the Lacanian Symbolic in Bodies That Matter (Butler, 1993),
Butler again pushes the Symbolic off its pedestal, reducing it to the status of
just another horizon of social norms, a form of reification with stark con-
sequences for gendered life . To uphold the sanctity of the Symbolic as the
basis for social and cultural organisation which psychoanalysis plainly
does is to retain an inner theological core. That Butler so perseveres (as she
has done in earlier work) with this job of prising open the doors of the
Symbolic (which she here likens to Antigone s tomb) is testimony to her
political commitment to rearranging gender relations, and in this case to
question the necessity of mothers and fathers. Of course there is a total
logic to this current inquiry, in that having demonstrated in Gender Trouble
(Butler, 1990) how gender is called into being, and for the sake of hetero-
sexual reproduction is repetitively enacted so as to become the basis for
recognition in terms of what it is to be human (i.e. being a girl ), Butler now
looks to the repeated enactments of kinship ideals when faced with the
challenge to social organisation here proposed in the figure of Antigone.
As though aware of the intractable problems in loosening the grip of
Oedipus and replacing his authority on how we live, with Antigone s more
fluid and uncertain power, Butler s persistence takes on something of
Antigone s gesture of defiance. She will not relinquish psychoanalysis in
favour of a mere feminist sociology of family life because that would be to
let go of understanding desire and its unruly proliferations, the uncon-
scious, fear, trauma, dreams, obsessions, compulsive repetitions, and so
on. As Campbell has argued Butler s work requires a psychoanalytic
account of the social production of the subject (Campbell, 2001).
Psychoanalysis also allows exploration of the whole range of psychic resist-
ances to change which is necessary for political understanding. Antigone
Uses Cultural Studies 10/3/05 11:52 am Page 189
Further Materials II: Butler s Antigone s Claim 189
stands at the interface between the psychic and the social and through her
Butler imagines a revised or re-articulated (let us say a weaker) Symbolic. A
post-structuralist kinship of this sort, would allow more diverse socially
survivable arrangements, carrying fewer parental warnings about harm to
children. Far from saying let s relax our attitudes to incest , Butler is show-
ing how the horror and fear of interfering with this foundational stricture
becomes a way of refusing to encounter proliferating and irregular rela-
tions of love and affiliation beyond those fully sanctioned by the state (see
also Bell, 1997).
Antigone is the unimaginable in culture, by virtue of her incestuous
parentage, her abject status produces a shudder across the social field, but
she also resists this status by defying the state and asserting a human bond
which she is not expected to dare to acknowledge. I think Butler asks us to [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]